Mérida in Bloom

The capital of Yucatán, Amy Wilentz discovers, is nothing less than Mexico's new capital of good life—a quiet, harmonious haven of Mayan culture, magnificent mansions, and increasingly masterful food, art, and design

Mérida's Plaza Grande hosts Yucatecan dance performances and a crafts market on Sundays. This folkloric dancer recently took part in a traditional vaquería (barn dance).

This was not how I had imagined my trip to sunny Mexico—hurricane season was supposed to be over. It was night, and we were coming into Mérida, the capital city of Yucatán—La Ciudad Blanca, as it is called, originally built with white local stone. This was supposed to be an idyll in a place removed, famously filled with the peacefulness of the Maya, yet rich too with new culture: art, food, music, books. But the white city of Mérida looked black to me tonight as we descended into—not through—the swirling clouds. We were in the vortex of a storm. Up we went again, circling, circling: No visibility, the pilot informed us. He would try one more descent; if that didn’t work, we’d be off to another airport.

We plunged down once more then, and I could see, just below us to the right, a disk of lights and land and hope at the center of the churning storm. We went through that hole, and under us, finally, there was Mérida, in the deluge: flat white roofs, wind-splayed palms, splashes of neon color. And quickly—too quickly, I felt—we were on the ground.

I got a nice big taxi, big as a boat, to take me into town. It turned out you needed a boat. We drove at a stately pace down a road that was a river, water running up over curbs and sidewalks. In the profound tones of a prophet, my driver informed me that thus it would be for the next week or so—torrential rains every evening. There is a hurricane sitting in the gulf, he told me.

It was a dramatic introduction to a place that, the next morning, was filled with heat and light and the peace I was looking for. Mérida’s very plan—a numerical grid of long, straight avenues lined with trees or storefronts and dotted with green plazas—is walkable and friendly. The city has become a magnet for Mexican and expatriate artists and culture-keepers, the kind of people one expects to be attracted to urban jitter or radical design. But they’ve been coming here because above all, for the moment, Mérida is safe. Narcotraficante gangs do not roam the avenidas, even in the darkest hours of night. There have been no drive-by shootings, no assassinations of mayors or prosecutors or judges, no bodies found curbside in the morning. Indeed, there is very little violent or property crime in Mérida at all.

Naturally, there is a lot of speculation about why this is so—in local newspapers, magazines, and among the people I spoke with, including then mayor Angelica Araujo. Some like to think that it is because the Maya, fifty-three percent of Yucatán’s population, are such a friendly, easygoing bunch. Others say that perhaps the Yucatán, with its beaches, ports, and flat, accessible interior, is the turf of a single, unchallengeable gang of traffickers who brook no interference. Some connect civil peace to the fact that the governor of the Yucatán is a woman. Another theory is that Mérida is both accessible yet distant from other urban areas; with good schools and pleasing prospects, it is where the narcos have decided to park their own families, and so make sure its streets are safe and its nights placid, its playgrounds and supermarkets bullet-free. (If you visit the northern edges of town, you can see evidence of the drug traffickers’ presence in the suburban “narcotecture”—giant, low-slung yellow or orange adobe compounds with pools and even helipads, set far back from the street and surrounded by high walls and visible security systems.)

Deborá Carnavali, a young artist I talked with, thinks it’s the intense heat that keeps Mérida calm. “Who can imagine rushing around with guns in this weather?” she asked.

Whatever the case may be, this city is like high ground in a flood: Those who can are flocking to it. “We can’t be unaware of Mexico’s problems,” Mayor Araujo told me. “We have to deal with this growth. The challenge is to remain a big village.”

Mérida is laid out as a numerical grid with long, straight avenues like Calle 60, ideal for walking (though horse-and-buggies also abound).

To cruise around town is to realize that this big village still has all the flavors of traditional Mexican life. I ambled down Calle 60, one of the main roads leading to the Plaza Grande. Of course, there was a demonstration—there always is in Mexico. This one was a protest by retirees proclaiming, with signs and bright horns, their right to their pensions. The march was colorful; some of the older women wore traditional clothing, and everyone held up banners. Meanwhile, gathered to protect passersby from this horde of wild demonstrators, the Federal Police had massed on street corners. Dressed in riot gear, they lounged against their armored cars and watched the marching elders go by. I popped into a silver store and looked at all the beautiful things for sale—necklaces, charms, vases, filigreed earrings. Then, a few feet away, I browsed a bookstore filled with American expats exchanging gossip about grocery shopping. Down the block, I stumbled upon an art gallery, and then another art gallery, and another, each showing a different school of contemporary Mexican art, with a few cash-generating souvenirs (special item: painted wooden spoons) thrown in.

Still on Calle 60, I picked up a tamale from a woman selling in a park, and as I ate, I looked up at the astounding Iglesia de la Tercera Orden behind her, built with Mayan temple stones in the seventeenth century and as massive and redoubtable as a backdrop for The Da Vinci Code. Mexican and foreign hippies and students were selling beads and blankets and tarnished trinkets here beside the tamale wallah. Walking along the same straight line, as one does in Mérida, I then passed a theater and the opera house and what seemed to be a half-dozen schools and universities and then the stand for the horse-and-buggies, decorated as if by a fanciful Frida Kahlo with plastic and silk flowers, white cotton and lace. In one of these contraptions, a rider feels enveloped as if by the stiff petticoats of the city. And then on and on, I am not kidding, past the seat of government and a handful of museums. To have really explored and enjoyed everything available on Calle 60 alone, I would have needed three days. Mérida is like that: Every street or avenue is a concentrated if linear adventure through culture, politics, and the vagaries of urban life.

There is a real-estate boom of sorts going on here, with outsiders from Mexico and the United States and Europe buying up old town houses and remodeling them. Following the money trail are the decorators, remodelers, architects, designers, tile-makers, masons, carpenters—all the sundry craftsmen and -women, both Meridano and from elsewhere—who cater to this trade. Beautiful houses are on the market cheap, many for less than $100,000.

Melva Medina—an artist and the owner of a gallery called Nahualli—came here seven years ago with her Oaxacan husband, Abel Vázquez, also an artist, just before the violence elsewhere began in earnest. Medina went to art school in Mexico City; Vázquez is from Asuncion Cuyotepeji, a small village where his grandmother was the mayora—not the elected mayor but the traditional indigenous leader. The Medina-Vázquez gallery is typical of houses recently renovated by artists and others in central Mérida. “We built up the project not just to have our own gallery but to have a house where you can invite people for cultural get-togethers,” Medina said. “We have workshops, concerts, dinners—for friends and the public.”

The gallery’s humble facade opens into an airy, stylish space. (Very few interiors in Mérida are in the familiar dark Spanish style.) The floors of the gallery are paved with the sumptuous tiles traditional in Meridano houses. One wall is painted a dazzling peacock blue, another a profound yellow. In a central atrium that also serves as a dining area is a small, turquoise pool.

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Above a sofa where a visitor sat consulting her cell phone, a gray half-human, half-animal crouched on all fours with one hand waving free; the creature’s breasts and buttocks managing to face the viewer at the same time. In another tableau, women in white with alien faces balanced banjos on their flat heads. A painting of birds and leaves framing a blue woman in the shape of a guitar was in the next room. All of this fantasy is presided over by the solid and bespectacled Medina in the solid and bourgeois town of Mérida.

David Sterling, a former New Yorker who is completing work on a definitive Yucatán cookbook for the U.S. market, has lived in Mérida for ten years. The house he bought here, on Calle 68, out of which he runs his cooking school, Los Dos, cost $42,000; he and his partner spent another $200,000 remodeling it. There, Sterling teaches Yucatecan cooking in a spectacularly tiled Giverny-like kitchen. Strewn with care across the central counter island are Yucatecan spices and seeds, such as cocoa and pumpkin, in small jars and bowls. Stenciled across the frieze in Sterling’s library/office are words from the novelist Victor Hugo: “There is nothing like a dream to create the future. Utopia today, flesh and blood tomorrow.” This could be Mérida’s motto, at least for its newcomers.

One morning I accompanied Sterling on his usual Sunday tour of the food markets. With his blondish hair, tiny goatee, and steel-rimmed glasses, he is clearly an outsider, but he chatted away in Spanish with the peasant women who had come to sell food. Sterling knew all the ladies, and they treated him with fondness, offering little extras for free, patting his hand.

A quail and squash-seed dish that the school’s chef-owner serves there.

At the corner entrance to a church at Santiago Park, Sterling gossiped with a tamale vendor. She starts buying produce on Fridays and then works with her two children, her husband, and an employee to compose the different kinds of packets that we were tasting from her broad tray; she then cooks them all Saturday night on a low charcoal fire for sale in the morning. Not only did they taste better than any tamales I’ve ever had (and I live in Los Angeles, arguably one of the world’s tamale capitals), but they are beautiful, even elegant, their pale banana leaves draped in shawls of bright-orange tomato-pepper sauce.

At the mercado, we went from table to table, restaurant to restaurant: El Buen Gusto, Panucho Yucateca, La Villa, La Guadalupana. We tried mondongo; we tried crab tortas. We tried sikil pak (a Yucatán specialty, like a Mayan hummus) and posolli with salt and chilies (another peninsular specialty, a thick cornmeal mash). We tried lime soup with turkey meat. All the dishes were good, and strange. Sterling said, as we ate companionably, “You have to know where to go for which food, and you have to know when to go.”

Meridano cuisine is not just about traditional foods eaten as you walk or at plastic-covered tables around the market in familial restaurants. One night I went, on Sterling’s advice, to Néctar, one of the city’s several new high-end restaurants, where the fusion experience even includes valet parking and martinis. It’s in an airy contemporary space: white walls, white tables, chic red plastic chairs, an open kitchen. The food has traditional Yucatecan touches playing over a European-style menu of rack of lamb, steak frites, seared fish, pasta dishes. The gelatos and sorbets are homemade, the crowd young, upscale, late-night—no one gets there before 9:30.

After dinner, I walked with some friends around the Plaza Grande, which comes alive at night. Horse-and-buggy drivers wait in line to take clients back home; they seem overly quaint until you realize how cheap they are. Nearby is the recently renovated opera house, now the home of the state symphony. The shows had let out, and everyone was down in the square, some in nighttime finery, most in jeans and traditional dress. All the stores were open, and everything was for sale—belts, embroidery, bedspreads, artwork, gaucho-style brocaded vests and shirts, hammocks, mortars and pestles, snacks of all kinds. On one corner, musicians were for rent—you pay them by the hour and they play under your fiancée’s window. A handsome young man was deep in negotiations with a band leader (Meridano men customarily use music to apologize for bad behavior). Other musicians were playing their guitars and maracas to advertise themselves, while shoppers, vendors, and snackers sat, or walked, or lolled around the square. Small children were out, even though it was past eleven. It was just another night, but like any night in Mérida, it was a party.

Many old haciendas around Mérida have been converted into chic resorts. Hacienda Sotuta de Peón, twenty-five miles south of the city, is a re-created working henequen plantation. The rails are for mule carts that carry plants from the fields to be processed into fiber.

In the late nineteenth century, Mérida became the world hub of henequen; an agave plant whose fiber is used to make rope and other products, it is the source of the wealth that created the beautiful neo-colonial houses that line the Paseo de Montejo. Haciendas were built across the Yucatán to accommodate plantation-style cultivation of the razor-leafed plant, henequen workers, and henequen processing. The henequen hacendados ruled the Yucatán with feudal authority into the twentieth century (the governor of the state was also the president of the henequen cartel). Conditions on the plantations were very tough, and there was no escape. Mayan peasants were indentured to the haciendas, and whole families lived and were put to work there. By the 1930s, however, the henequen market was in serious decline and the federal government was instituting land reform; over time, numerous haciendas were abandoned.

But the buildings themselves remained standing. Some are moldering reminders of an era of different values and political mores, but others have been put to use, factories of misery transformed into the most elegant of resorts. It’s a weird transformation.

At Hacienda Santa Rosa—one of three short side trips I took out of the city—you eat in the great house where the masters lived, at widely spaced tables on the broad terrace. The meals are very good. You’re served as in the old days by a family of employees whose ancestors actually worked on the hacienda. The conceit of the place, which appeals to kindly, earth-loving vacationers, is that it employs locals and helps them learn trades, while being eco-friendly. Outside the vast guest bedrooms are spacious patios with hammocks strung from the walls. Just feet away, sunk into the lawn, water bubbles in a long rectangular pool with sections walled off for each room. I took an evening swim in my pool. Moths and bats and swallows flittered across a pale sky. First I did a few laps of crawl, then a side stroke, and finally I let myself float on my back, gazing up at the darkening night. And what did I see? Sure, the moon. But also, striped at the top in red and white, the smokestack of the old henequen factory. History comes at you in many guises in the Yucatán.

For this is an old place, an ancient place. Everything here tells you this plain fact, despite the overlay of more recent history and the insistent chatter of current events and politics. Indigenous America lives on in the Yucatán in ways that were long ago eradicated farther north. You taste it in the food: cornmeal wrapped in banana leaves, twice-cooked corn dough, chocolate with a faint tang of the acidic earth it’s grown in, meats cooked underground in that same earth. You see the ancients in the faces of the people in Mérida. You hear them in the Mayan language, a tonal, shushing, whispery tongue full of catches and staccato. You hear them in the names: Yaxcopoil and Xlapak, Dzibilnocac and Xpujil. And of course you see them in the ancient monolithic cities that rise out of the plains with shocking majesty: Uxmal, Chichen Itza, Cobá.

Along the way to Uxmal, about forty miles southwest of Mérida, a friend and I stopped here and there to look at markets and churches in small towns, to buy tequila in a little shop, to check out the cenotes, natural sinkholes that have pierced the top of aquifers fed by natural springs below the limestone. Geologically, the Yucatán is a vast limestone plateau with no rivers. Instead, since forever, the Maya have taken their drinking water from cenotes, which look like underground lakes or wide natural wells. Because of their extreme beauty and clarity, many cenotes are swimmable and attract visitors. But there are others unknown to outsiders; here was one, right in the middle of a tiny roadside town. It was set sixty or seventy feet into the ground, and you had to be careful at the edge. Some high-school kids had gathered near it after school to hang out; narcocorridos were playing on their radio, songs about the violent but fabulous life of a drug-trafficking macho and his babes. Standing amid low brush and palms, I looked down over the edge into the cenote and saw, far below, the deepest blue reflecting up at me.

Uxmal is said to be the most spiritual of the Mayan ruins. But here too, the edifices remind you of the lives it must have taken to build them, of the authority that must have been brought to bear to enforce their construction, of the gods who must have been invoked to support that authority. As I stood now atop the pyramid, the zenith where the rulers once stood, I could see that they must have felt the raw power that comes from literal condescension. Everyone below, you above. Today, where once tens of thousands gathered to worship and praise, there were some tiny visitors over in the west corner of the giant plaza, a tiny gardener with a speck of a lawn mower in the middle of the huge lawn. How long would it take this mini-Sisyphus to trim the grass? A month? A year? It would all grow back before he finished. Other people dotted the ancient Mayan ball courts where games were once staged with balls made of stone. Far away across the lawn, in shadow, I could see a pack of Mayan women and girls. They were like pink and white brushstrokes of color as they worked with small instruments and little hands to clean decades of guano from the temple arcades, another endless task.

The view was magnificent, but woe to the king who had vertigo. . . . Even for those who think themselves masters of the world and unafraid of heights, negotiating these steep stairs that reach into the blue, high above the earth, must involve a deep-seated, even primitive human battle with the death-fear. I had to edge my way down sideways, until I was back at the level where people and lawn mower seemed real.

Like the rest of Mexico, Mérida comprises so many eras, all in some way happening simultaneously. It’s the land of this afternoon’s lawn mower as well as of the lord on high. It is the land of the Maya, ancient and contemporary; there are the deserted ball courts of the ancient kings, and at the same time, today’s intense soccer allegiances. Downtown, a yuppie bar-restaurant that couldn’t be more bourgeois—hipsters at the bar, American couples dining on one level, retirees on another, a cocktail lounge area high on a balcony—is named after the campesino revolutionary and outlaw Pancho Villa, who died in 1923. There are the gracious nineteenth-century Spanish-style homes of the old henequen merchants, and the expats and non-Yucatecan Mexicans living in them today. There are the fabulous churches of Mérida, and yet the feeling that a secular, worldly, telenovela-obsessed, iPad-tapping, unspiritual culture operates here alongside the kneeling and confessing abuelitas.

The old Mayan highways used to go straight from one temple city to the next; now, new roads lead from Mérida to the ocean resorts of Quintana Roo on the Caribbean, and Campeche, and Yucatán’s own Celestún on the gulf. In search of a beach, I went to the Hotel Xixim, in Celestún, a resort that caters to the sybaritic but eco-conscious traveler. The hurricane I’d flown in through was still hovering over the gulf, but Hotel Xixim warmed up under a bright sun every day. Only the flamingos who dwell deep within the mangrove forests on this ecologically diverse and species-crowded coast were affected by the now distant storm. The high waters had disturbed their normal feeding, because these giant pink primordial creatures need to keep their stomach feathers dry while they stretch their necks down the length of their fragile legs to reach food in the water.

Hurricanes do wonders for a sunset. That night, I watched the sun go down through flamingo-colored flames into the tannin-dark sea. A small, silvery shark plied the waters near shore. During a boat ride that morning, I had seen yellow-headed vultures as we sped over the gulf waters toward the flamingo roost in the mangroves, as well as great egrets, frigate birds, willets, marble titwings, sandwich terns, black-bellied plovers, roseate spoonbills, pelicans, cormorants, a wood stork, and a great blue heron. But tonight was dedicated to the swallows that flew low from out of the pink toward the dark charcoal inland sky, gulping down mosquitoes—but not enough of them—as they plunged.

On my last night in Mérida, I went bar-hopping with friends till late in the night; hippies were still out in the smaller squares selling blankets and who knows what else. The Plaza Grande was emptying, although still illuminated with neon signs and up-lighting for the most beautiful bits of architecture. We were walking down Calle 60, empty now, finally—past galleries and silver stores and car rental places and restaurants and the English-language bookstore. The pretty little pastel houses of the daytime had turned into cubes of gray and black at night, but they still looked like children’s blocks, boxy and small. We were tired out from too much fun, too many places, too many people, too much to see, but what we were not—and we marveled at it—was frightened in the least, at this late hour, on this deserted street, in Mexico today. But exhausted—and having resisted it every other day—we took a horse and buggy home to the hotel.